"I like a good story, well told. That is the reason I am sometimes forced to tell them myself." - Mark Twain

Monday, August 27, 2018

And The Hits Just Keep On Coming

This is not the story, or topic, I wanted to open the week with. I was going to put off even looking at the topic until the end of the week, for just a cursory check-in, like last week.I would have been happy not to speak of this story again. Ever.That's how "alarmist" I am.Well, so much for fond hopes.

Y'all do as you like.For me, this news moves the currently-small outbreak in DRC from an occasional glance, to a regular visit, with both eyes on:

(WSJ) “This outbreak is still in the escalation phase,” said Robert Redfield, director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which has staff working to stem the outbreak in Congo, neighboring countries and the Geneva headquarters of the World Health Organization. “The key is identifying (patients’) contacts and getting people vaccinated.”

On Friday, the WHO said a doctor in the town of Oicha in Ituri province had become ill with Ebola and may have infected his wife. The cases are the first in “an area of high insecurity,” said Peter Salama, the WHO’s emergency response chief. “It really was the problem we were anticipating, and the problem at the same time that we were dreading,” he said.
Officials have identified 97 people in the town who may have been exposed and need to be vaccinated, but haven’t been able to reach them all due to security concerns, Dr. Salama said.
While Oicha itself isn’t under rebel control, it is surrounded almost entirely by territory controlled by the Allied Democratic Forces, Uganda’s Islamic dissidents that are one of the dozens of foreign and local armed groups operating in Congo’s gold and tin mining heartlands.
Large numbers of civilians have been killed around Oicha and aid workers, priests and government officials are being held hostage, Dr. Salama said. Health teams from the U.N. and Congo’s government managed to reach the town accompanied by military escorts, but staff from nongovernmental groups have been locked out.

Dr. Salama said the WHO expects at least one more wave of cases.

That all is concerning, but they bury the real money quotes at the bottom of the article:

The 1.3 million people, including thousands of refugees, who live in the region have endured violent insurgencies dating back to the 1990s. But it is their first time experiencing an Ebola outbreak, stunning a rural population where many believe the virus is sent by evil spirits, aid officials say.

“Many can’t comprehend the idea of not being able to bury dead loved ones according to tradition,” said Hassan Coulibaly, a field director in eastern Congo for the International Rescue Committee. “We are trying to educate them, but the environment is hostile”
Last week, locals angered by health officials’ insisting they forego traditional burial practices, including washing bodies to avoid infection, burned down a health center in Mangina, the epicenter of the outbreak, pushing out medical personnel, according to the WHO. A local team administering vaccinations was also beaten up in Manbangu village, some 10 kilometers west of Mangina, while the IRC was forced to close down its health facility in the village of Mabalako following an attack from locals.

So, just like with the ignorant tribal jackholes in West African nations in 2014, this is going to take months to try and get a handle on, not days nor even weeks, by which time it will multiply by several orders of magnitude, like it does, to hundreds and thousands of cases, even with a vaccine, and cross one or two international borders, and so on, and so on, and so on. And it's already off to the races now.Grab your hats; here we go again.And for comedy gold, the outbreak began in "Mangina".You can't make this stuff up.Next, we're going to see if international and national leadership has learned any effing thing at all from 2014, and if so, how much. Last I heard, Japan and ROK were pledging support to try and stamp this out ASAP; they get it. But this is going to take far more than that, including quite probably, a military mission to wade in and finally pacify the region, and squash the rebel militias holding sway five feet outside all the villages.That won't be the French Foreign Legion, the Bundeswehr, the Paras, or the Dutch Marines, boys and girls. Everybody's going to look in one direction, seeing whether we dive in, or back away.You heard it here first.

I leave it for the clever tier of thinkers to ponder what happens if we don't go; then, what happens if we do; and finally, if we decide we have to go in, what happens when an American military person contracts Ebola, whether it's a medical relief mission, or some grunt or Combat Barbie, trying to push guerrillas out of the afflicted area.BONUS: And/or, brings it home with them. Because Murphy hates the military since ever.There's always the common sense approach that will never happen.

Oh, and for double bonus points, it's an overwhelmingly Islamic guerrilla force.Because, apparently, you can't just have a $#!^ sandwich, you have to order it with the delicious e. coli and c. dif. Special Sauce.Because what we really need in this country is another jungle war, and a fresh war with Islam, on a continent that eats outsiders and spits them out, combined with an Ebola outbreak."Hey, Bernie, I've got this great script, it's Contagion meets Tears Of The Sun and Blackhawk Down. Brad, George, and Matt are already down to do it, Denzel is interested too, and Steven and Ridley are fighting over who gets to direct. It's gonna be yuuuuuuuuuge!!!!What?? No, HELL no, we're gonna shoot it in Hawaii. I smell half a billion bucks net, baby!"And some people think the universe doesn't have a sense of humor...?!

It's all about culling. Nature and Nature's God will not be mocked or ignored. Whether it's the Hutus and Tutsis hacking each other to death with Pangas, or Ebola and some other fatal disease scything its way through way too many Africans, balance will be restored. As Charles De Gaulle once opined: "...it is not Africa's Century."As far as the FSSA .mil sticking its nose into another place where it does not belong, I have no dog in that fight. If these Camo-wears want to continue to drink the FEDGOV Kool-Aid and voyage and die for Wall Street Banksters, that is their business. I hope the current POTUS is not part of any "humanitarian" rope-a-dope.

HEY! Got me a solution--modeled after the "Haiti Relief Services" escapade run by (who else?) THE CLINTON FOUNDATION! Hell, why re-invent the wheel for world-wide calamities? Yepper. Send in Billy Boy, Hitlery and Chelsie-Delsie to "solve" the tragic Ebola problem. The Media will be in a frenzy covering these "Good Sams" and all will be well (((NOT!))) … and nothing will become of the millions vacuumed up by THE CLINTON FOUNDATION.

And the victims, both there and abroad...well---they're just little people and/or deplorables.

Last time around NYC put out a pamphlet entitled "Ebola, Are You At Risk?" or some such horse squeeze. Basically said you've got nothing to worry about if you haven't been to Africa, or haven't been in contact with anyone who has. Of course in NYC the definition of "contact with" is up for discussion, many times I've put my hand in/stepped in/sat in something liquid that wasn't beer or coffee (and one time watched a homeless guy laughing while pissing down a banister on the stairs leading to the subway).

"“Many can’t comprehend the idea of not being able to bury dead loved ones according to tradition,” said Hassan Coulibaly, a field director in eastern Congo for the International Rescue Committee. “We are trying to educate them, but the environment is hostile”.

- Well, that is Africa for you. Didn't try looking up the average IQ for Congo, but I have read that 65 to 70 is the norm in many parts of Africa. You can't raise their IQ, so how do you help them? There are problems that education cannot cure.As one white ex-African once said; "there are a hundred ways to die in Africa". This makes 101.

I rather think the ChiComs might have something to say about us going in there with the .mil, seeing as how they've colonized the joint, and region. All of our nifty eee-lectronic devices rely on lithium ion batteries. The limiting factor isn't lithium, that's all over the world. Turns out the limiting factor is cobalt. Three real sources in the world for that one. PRK, Russia, and....the DRC. Because the PRC couldn't get the stuff nearly as cheaply as from Congo to make all of our cheap trinkets, they go there. Using near slave labor, child labor, child soldiers, and they use methods that actually *do* rape Gaia (unlike what our local Commies think we do here). Funny, I thought the Left was against colonialism, slavery, child labor and raping the Erf. Guess I was mistaken.

I forgot to add: Those Chinese ""slavedrivers"" managers are a pretty bright bunch, but there a lot of them in the DRC. Just one has to see signs in his area, and *he's* not symptomatic, so he panics and jumps the first plane to (any given value of Chinese city, population >10 mln) home. And we don't have any Americans doing business in those same cities, right?

Well, that was a heart accelerate. It's not like medication resistant TB, Chagas, Diversity enrichment, or the resurrection of ancient diseases is enough: now we can panic 50 miles from the nearest -international- airport. Because you know, in your heart of hearts, some rebel from Wakanda is heading to the FUSA to see about his headache. And the cheerleaders of Pelosi will be there to welcome him "home". If being a recluse had some appeal.........Riddle me this: why is it always priests/ministers that get held hostage? I never hear of a rabbi. Do rabbis get a free pass, or do the Jews just not care to convert the heathens?This could be the pandemic that resets the normal button, in a very cruel way. I don't support sending our military into this morass. We have enough shenanigans to manage without adding a death sentence at the end of someone's tour. Will Trump & the CONgress critters just build the damned wall and enforce some sort of immigration policy??

Now those boatloads of "refugees" coming across the Med could have a couple - or more - of people coming in with Ebola. That means that migrant camps get hit first, then people who come into contact with migrants - including rape victims. Then their families. "Replacement" would end up being something else entirely - try "decimation". The sensible policy would be to either turn boats back to Africa, or sink them and not pick up survivors - and if the Aquarius tried to run the blockade, sink it, too.

Spaniel, it's because the Catholic Church and many Protestant denominations are *infested* with marxists. Also why illegals who are about to be deported sometimes claim asylum in a church, why they're fighting any sensible immigration policy, fighting for thugs and against cops. Have problems with the PDs if you want, I often do. But actively fighting for disarmament of good people, and against actual violent criminals?!? Churches fighting *for* abortion? Again, have your own beliefs, but churches? For the RCs, go take a stroll through Ann Barnhardt's archives (barnhardt.biz).

For a good idea of what really happens in something like that, here's a 3-part video of a presentation to a Prep group by a missionary who was there in Sierra Leone during the last Ebola epidemic. He goes back in late October. His wife was sent home early and stayed with my wife and I, so all 3 of us were under a 21-day quarantine.

1) No one, anywhere, has any actual idea of what the native reservoir for Ebola is in Africa.No one.

2) I've lived in the tropics. Every tree is a fruit bat tree.That's how they roll.

3) Mom and sister and grandma also probably prepare "bush meat", i.e. roadkill, bat, rat, monkey, whatever.It's just as likely that Little Patient Zero was playing with the goods in the kitchen(which could be nothing but a flat rock by the fire) at home before they were cooked. No one will ever know.

4) West Africa is hampered by a number of things:they're pre-literatethey're pre-numeratethey're pre-scientificthey're pre-industrialthey're uneducated.That would be bad enough, but the government, besides being all that, is also ignorant, stupid, lazy, corrupt, and selfishly evil.The first five multiplied by the second six gets you a pandemic like we saw in 2014.

5) Your missionary friend was also clearly completely in the dark, by circumstance and choice, if they had no idea what was going on. I was reading about the outbreak in April 2014, it started in December of 2013, and Ramadan wasn't until the end of June 2014 through late July 2014. This thing had jumped the shark by May. Somebody at home should be corresponding with him more frequently, if only to pump in some reality before it's five months too late, and the roof falls in.

6) A 21-day quarantine is too short against a disease that can incubate from 5-42 days. You're flipping a coin that always has to come up head, every time. You get a 22-day incubation period, and you've boned yourself, in a Darwin Award-winning manner.

7) The casualty figures he quoted, for the 10,000th time, are an open joke.If he doesn't know that, he shouldn't be printing up fact sheets.Try 50-60K dead, and 70-90K infected, for something in the same zip code as reality.Why? See #4, above. Africa wins again.(cont.)

(cont.)8) The only reason the countries Ebola spread to (US, UK, France, Germany, Norway, Italy, Switzerland) didn't turn into West Africa was not all the things we do that they don't, and vice versa, from #4.It's because we (and they) didn't quite get enough casualties all at once to turn them into West Africa overnight. Two US patients more is a thin nail to hang the entire country's survival on, and that's where it hangs.In Harry Potter, Professor McGonagle summed that up properly as "pure, dumb luck."

9) No one, particularly not WHO, MSF, or the CDC, knows why the epidemic there stopped, finally, two years later. Of all the goals and metrics they issued to guarantee containment of the outbreak, not a single one was met. Ever.

My personal suspicion is that rather than containment, they finally had enough people die that what was left was manageable, and it burned itself out faster than we could bungle the containment. But that's just a hunch.

10) Washing your hands, while always a good idea, doesn't help if you're handling infected bush meat.It doesn't fix playing with corpses.And it doesn't overcome ignorance, superstition, paranoia, illiteracy, and general dumbassery, or government stupidity, hubris, and evil. That plus the Ebola is what killed people there, and it killed people in the US the exact same way too. First world filtered through those handicaps gets you more Ebola, and we proved it, right in Dallas TX and Washington DC.

11) He's a nice guy, and I hung in there through all three parts, but he's a guy who packed a 10-minute talk into an hour and a half.And then missed out on the actual lessons for how to prepare:

a) be somewhere elseb) if you can't do that, stay home and lock the doorc) have enough supplies (in this case, 27 months' worth would have been the magic number) to outlast the outbreak

If he's going to be doing this, he needs to sit down and educate himself a bit more, or just stick to what he knows and what he learned, which isn't very much in either case.But he is a microcosm of a why first-world sensibilities don't help with Ebola if you don't know what you don't know.

Glad he made it through okay, but I hope he takes things to heart a bit more before he goes back. God is good, but ignorance amidst an epidemic is a great way to meet him ahead of schedule.

My Blog List

About the Blog List

Not counting the news outlets or websites along the full range of accuracy and veracity, I follow 10 or so actual individuals' handwritten blogs. Looking them over, 8 of the 10 are current serving or former military and 4 of those 8 are some variation of high-speed low-drag elite forces ninjas. And 2 are cops.So in other words, the same folks I trusted in the military not to wet the bed, sh*t themselves, or otherwise run around like headless Nancys, are the same folks I trust on the interwebz, for demonstrating pretty much the same trustworthiness and circumspectly responsible behavior.Color me shocked.

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